Contents

Life

Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants
Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar
Lorde, who settled in Harlem.
Nearsighted to the point of being legally
blind, and the youngest of three daughters (her sisters named
Phyllis and Helen), Lorde grew up hearing her mother's stories
about the West Indies. She learned to talk while she
learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to
write at around the same time. She wrote her first poem when she
was in eighth grade.

Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop
the "y" from her name while still a child, explaining in Zami:
A New Spelling of My Name, that she was more interested in the
artistic symmetry of the "e"-endings in the the two side-by-side
names "Audre Lorde" than in spelling her name the way her parents
had intended.[1][2]

In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National
University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of
affirmation and renewal: she confirmed her identity on personal and
artistic levels as a lesbian
and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde went to college, worked
as a librarian, continued writing and became an active participant
in the gay
culture of Greenwich Village.

Lorde furthered her education at Columbia University, earning a
master's degree in library science in 1961. She also worked during
this time as a librarian at Mount Vernon Public Library and
married attorney Edwin Rollins: they divorced in 1970 after having
two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. In 1966, Lorde became head
librarian at Town School Library in New York City, where she
remained until 1968.

In 1968 Lorde was writer-in-residence at Tougaloo
College in Mississippi,[3]
where she met Frances Clayton, a white professor of psychology, who
was to be her romantic partner until 1989. From 1977 to 1978 Lorde
had a brief affair with the sculptor and painter Mildred
Thompson. The two met in Nigeria in 1977 at the Second World
Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77). Their
affair ran its course during the time that Thompson lived in
Washington, DC [4]
and was teaching at Howard University. [5]
Lorde later became romantically involved with Gloria Joseph, her
partner until Lorde's death. Lorde died on November 17, 1992, in St.
Croix, after a 14-year struggle with breast cancer. She was
58.

In her own words, Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet".[6] In an
African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name
Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her
Meaning Known".

Career

Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s —
in Langston
Hughes's 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign
anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she
was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist
movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First
Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by
Diane di
Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High
School. Dudley
Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book
that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there,
implicit, in the bone."

Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was
mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in
Mississippi, addresses themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the
complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for
the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her
homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at
all."

Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay
rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and
Cherrie Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen
Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of
colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.[7]

Theory

Lorde criticised feminists of the 1960s, from the National Organization for
Women to Betty
Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, for
focusing on the particular experiences and values of white middle-class
women. Her writings are based on the "theory of difference", the
idea that the binary opposition between men and women is overly
simplistic: although feminists have found it necessary to present
the illusion of a solid, unified whole, the category of women
itself is full of subdivisions.

Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender and even
health — this last was added as she battled cancer in her later
years — as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued
that, although the gender difference has received all the focus,
these other differences are also essential and must be recognised
and addressed. "Lorde," it is written, "puts her emphasis on the
authenticity of experience. She wants her difference acknowledged
but not judged; she does not want to be subsumed into the one
general category of 'woman'".[8] In a
period during which the women's movement was associated with white
middle-class women, Lorde campaigned for a feminist movement
conscious of both race and class.

While acknowledging that the differences between women are wide
and varied, most of Lorde's works are concerned with two subsets
which concerned her primarily — race and sexuality. She observes
that black women's experiences are different from those of white
women, and that, because the experience of the white woman is
considered normative, the black woman's experiences are
marginalised; similarly, the experiences of the lesbian (and, in
particular, the black lesbian) are considered aberrational, not in
keeping with the true heart of the feminist movement. Although they
are not considered normative, Lorde argues that these experiences
are nevertheless valid and feminine.

Lorde stunned white feminists with her claim that racism, sexism and homophobia were linked, all coming from the
failure to recognise or inability to tolerate difference. To allow
these differences to continue to function as dividers, she
believed, would be to replicate the oppression of women: as long as
society continues to function in binaries, with a mandatory greater
and lesser, Normative and Other, women will never be free.

Lorde and Contemporary
Feminist Thought

Lorde set out actively to challenge white women, confronting
issues of racism in feminist thought. She maintained that a great
deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the
oppression of black women, a conviction which led to angry
confrontation, most notably in the scathing open letter addressed
to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly.[9]

This fervent disagreement with notable white feminists furthered
her persona as an "outsider": "in the institutional milieu of black feminist and black lesbian feminist
scholars [...] and within the context of conferences sponsored by
white feminist academics, Lorde stood out as an angry, accusatory,
isolated black feminist lesbian voice".[10]

The criticism did not go only one way: many white feminists were
angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her essay "The Master's
Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"[11],
Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as
unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by
denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely
passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they
were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligned
white feminists with white male slave-masters, describing both as
"agents of oppression".[12]

Thus did she enrage a great many white feminists, who saw her
essay as an attempt to privilege her identities as black and
lesbian, and assume a moral authority based on suffering. Suffering
was a condition universal to women, they claimed, and to accuse
feminists of racism would cause divisiveness rather than heal it.
In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not
suffering. Anger, not moral authority."[13]

Poetry

A contemporary of such feminist poets as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, Lorde also expressed her
womanhood through poetry. While Plath and Rich were changing the
traditions of both prose and poetry to render them more
autobiographical, Lorde combined genres at will: to her, life was
essential to text, so everything became autobiographical.

Lorde focused her discussion of difference not only on
differences between groups of women but between conflicting
differences within the individual. "I am defined as other in every
group I'm part of," she declared. "The outsider, both strength and
weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation,
no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between
me and my oppression".[14] She
described herself both as a part of a "continuum of women"[15] and a
"concert of voices" within herself.[16]

Lorde's conception of her many layers of selfhood is replicated
in the multi-genres of her work. Critic Carmen Birkle writes, "Her
multicultural self is thus reflected in a multicultural text, in
multi-genres, in which the individual cultures are no longer
separate and autonomous entities but melt into a larger whole
without losing their individual importance".[17] Her
refusal to be placed in a particular category, whether social or
literary, was characteristic of her determination to come across as
an individual rather than a stereotype.

The First Cities ·Cables to
Rage ·From a
Land Where Other People Live ·New York Head Shop and
Museum ·Coal ·Between Our Selves ·The Black
Unicorn ·Chosen Poems: Old and New ·Our Dead Behind
Us ·Need: A
Chorale for Black Woman Voices ·The Marvelous
Arithmetics of Distance

From Wikiquote

Audre Geraldine Lorde (February
18, 1934 in Harlem, New York City - 1992) was a multi-faceted
writer and activist.

Sourced

When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion
of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the
knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language,
our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

entry for June 26 Living Life Fully in Meditations for
Women Who Do Too Much, Anne Wilson Schaef, c. 1990

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service
of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am
afraid.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever /
Only, nothing is eternal.

Undersong

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most
important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the
risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking
profits me, beyond any other effect.

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action",
in Sister Outsider

Your silence will not protect you.

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action",
in Sister Outsider

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a
drug or chisel or remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in
myself.

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other
until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen
from us, the love of Black women for each other.

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's
House", in Sister Outsider

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate
the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into
me -- to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth
does in hills and peaks.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Attributed

It is not our differences that divide us. it is our inability
to recognize, accept & celebrate those differences.

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other
without always understanding what will be created.

We are powerful because we have survived.

The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of
self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into
other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual
arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force
which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own
needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for
that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will
choke us.

Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize
we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand
that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival,
and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is
something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to
clarity.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has
direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes
which we hope to bring about through those lives.

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted.
Each victory must be applauded.

Our visions begin with our desires.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital
necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light
within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and
change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more
tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the
nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes
and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock
experiences of our daily lives.